Imagine waking up one day with a new talent, something you'd never shown aptitude for before, but were now really good at.
It happened for Palmerston North woman Shellie Hanley after a brain injury left her with an impaired memory.
But it seems it also left her with the ability to play the harp.
The musical instrument aptitude came into her life after a fall inside her house truck.
"On the 9th of December 2017 at half past five in the morning I woke up with excruciating abdominal pain,” Hanley told Seven Sharp.
"The pain took me out, I fell down in my truck and the back lower temporal lobe left side of my head struck a wooden plinth."
The accident left her hospitalised with a traumatic brain injury.
"I remember while I was recovering in bed for months, I would watch YouTube videos of people playing the harp, and I'd pretend, air guitar type thing, that I was playing the harp.
“I just became obsessed with it and I just had to have one."
After recovering, Hanley got herself one, and a teacher.
What followed was a rapid progression from beginner, to harp virtuoso.
Not only can she play, but she also composes.
“I started to hear music flooding in, and I was hearing it in everything. I'd go outside and I'd hear the birds singing and, in their song,I could hear music, or at the river, hear the water and hear music.
“Suddenly I had this ability to hear music all the time, to the point where it would wake me up at 2-3 in the morning."
But while her musical ability flourished things she'd always been able to do, became difficult.
"I struggled with communicating, some language was difficult to access."
A neurosurgeon Seven Sharp spoke to believes science can explain Hanley’s sudden musical talent.
“It sounds like what we call acquired savant syndrome,” Ivan Iniesta from Palmerston North Hospital says.
He says when one side of the brain is injured the other side can compensate, also warning a brain injury is never good news.
Hanley though, says she wouldn't change it for the world.
"I would take my brain injury as a blessing.
"As soon as I had the harp in my hands, it felt like an old friend and like I'd being playing it all my life."
SHARE ME